Last Day in Boulder

I leave for New Mexico and Gila tomorrow. Rode 5 hours today with a crit near the end. I felt good and got off the front some, but the course was so boring I think I forgot I was racing for most of it. I just rode in circles until everyone stopped. Good day of training, though.

Funny story from yesterday, though. The theme of the story is that nothing ever goes perfectly.

I've been needing to replace the bike rack on my car for awhile now. The old one was the public bus style, so it held the bike by the wheels and protected them well, but it was really too big and heavy for my little Toyota, and it scraped the ground and scared my passengers.

I bought a new rack that should do the job better and went to install it yesterday. Of course, the hitch pin was bent and wouldn't budge. I bought a hammer to get it out, but that didn't work, so I went to plan B: I intentionally backed my car (rack first) into a pole on the opposite side of the bent. It was fun as hell, and it worked.

Like I said, though, nothing ever goes perfectly. When I went to slide the new hitch tongue in, there was a metal tab in my receiver that was directly in the way. No clue why that was there, but I guess this hitch tongue was longer than the ones on my previous racks.

Enter the industrial file. I actually had one of these in my toolbox for lawyer tab removal and it finally got some major use. Once I filed most of the tab off, and then decided to do the rest of the job by jamming the new hitch into the hole as hard as I could. That worked as well, but it took a few hard thrusts, and my knuckle got jammed in one of them. I don't give a fuck about pain, so I finished the job without treating it. Passersby were amazed at the unusually large quantities of blood.

In the picture below, you can see blood spots on the rack instruction manual.